Beverly leaned into him, the toe of her hiking boot grazing his leg. He saw that she’d removed the knee socks so that her legs were bare, solid legs, smooth, descending to the sculpted hollows of her ankles. “So what do you want to do?” she asked, and they might have been on a date in some anonymous place, not a care in the world that wasn’t immediate and erotic. “You can’t sit up in your car all night long, you’re not going to do that, are you?”
He was. That was the least he could do. There was a sleeping bag in the trunk. He’d wrap himself in that.
“Because, well, you’re going to have to drive me back to get my car, and I’m perfectly willing to sit there with you for as long as you want and we can honk the horn every once in a while, to signal, but you should know I took a room here for the night, very reasonable actually, and you’re welcome — I mean, no strings attached — if you want to get some sleep, that is…”
In some way it was Syl’s own fault, trusting Mal like that, keeping up the chatter — the flirtation — till neither of them was paying the slightest bit of attention to the trail or where it went or what had happened to the rest of the group, which must have been around the next turn, sure it was, and why worry? It wouldn’t have fazed Mal. Or Syl. He would have liked a bed — and whatever else Beverly was offering — but he could already foresee exactly what was going to happen.
He was going to drive her to her car where it sat beneath the trees in the impenetrable dark and he was going to say no to her, but gently, and there’d be a kiss and maybe a bit more — he wasn’t dead yet — but then she’d get in her car and the brake lights would flash and she’d be gone, back to the lodge and the lights and the music. And he’d sit there wrapped up in the sleeping bag, stiff and miserable, till dawn broke and the Search and Rescue team hurried up the path he was too drained to negotiate and within the hour they’d be back, bearing Mal on a stretcher because Mal was too far gone with cold and disorientation to stand upright on his own. A few minutes — five, ten? — would elapse, each one thunderous, dropping down on him like a series of explosions. He’d be out of the car, moving toward the trailhead, and there she’d be, dehydrated maybe, suffering from exposure, but tall still, and erect, her head held high and her step firm, Syl, the old lady he was married to.
(2011)
Sic Transit
There was a foul odor coming from the house — the odor, as it turned out, of rotting flesh — but nobody did anything about it, at least not at first. I was away at the time, my business taking me to the East Coast for a series of fruitless meetings with a consortium of inadequate and unserious people whose names I forgot the minute I settled into the first-class cabin for the trip back home, and so I had the story from my wife’s walking partner, Mary Ellen Stovall, who makes her living in real estate. We’d always wondered about that house, which was something of an eyesore in the neighborhood — or would have been an eyesore, that is, if it was visible from the street. We went by the place nearly every day, my wife Chrissie and I, running errands or strolling down to the beach club or one of the shops and restaurants on the main road. The houses around it — tasteful, well-kept and very, very pricey — were what you’d expect from a California coastal community, in styles ranging from craftsman to Spanish mission to contemporary, most of them older homes that had been extensively remodeled, in some cases taken right down to the frame or even the original slab. But what this one looked like was anybody’s guess because the trees and shrubbery had long since gone wild so that all you saw was a curtain of green enclosing a gravel drive, in the center of which stood — or rather, listed — an ancient, rust-spattered Buick the size of our two Priuses combined.
As it happened, the man who lived there—had lived there — was a recluse in his early sixties whom no one, not even the next-door neighbors, could recall ever having seen. The properties on either side of him featured eight-foot walls topped with bougainvillea that twisted toward the sun in great puffed-up balls of leaf and thorn and flame-red flower, and as I say, his property had reverted to nature so that his flat acre on a bluff with ocean views might as well have been sectioned out of the Amazonian jungle for all anybody could see into — or out of — it. Isolation, that was what he had. Isolation so absolute it took that odor and a span of eight full days after he’d expired for the police and firemen, who’d arrived simultaneously in response to the neighbors’ complaints, to force open the door and find him sunk into his bed, his mouth thrown open and the mattress so stained with his fluids it had to be burned once the coroner and the forensics people had got done with him.
Why am I telling you all this? Because of what came next, of what I discovered both on my own and with Mary Ellen Stovall’s help, and because I’m in a period of my life — I just turned fifty — when I’ve begun to think less about the daily struggle and more of what awaits us all in the end. Here was an anonymous death, unattended, unmourned, and the thought of it, of this man, whoever he was, drawing his last breath in a run-down house on a very valuable piece of property not two blocks from where Chrissie and I had bought in at top dollar during the very crest of the boom, spoke to me in some deep way I couldn’t define. Had he suffered? Had he lain there for days, weeks, a month, too ill or derelict in his soul to call for help? Had he slowly starved? Mary Ellen — who was to get the listing once the surviving relative, a brother, equally bereft, in some godforsaken place like Nebraska or Oklahoma, had given her the go-ahead — claimed that the body had been practically engulfed in a litter of soda cans, half-filled containers of microwave noodles, and (this really got to me) blackened avocado skins from the tree out back.
According to the ten-line story that appeared in the local paper the day after I got back, the dead man had been identified as Carey Fortunoff, and he’d once been a member of an obscure rock band called Metalavox, after which he disappeared from public view, though he continued to write the occasional song for other bands and singers, a few of whom were named in the article, but they must have been equally obscure since neither Chrissie nor I had ever heard of them. Out of curiosity I googled the band and came up with a single paragraph that was virtually a duplicate of what the paper had run. There was a photo, in black and white, of the five band members in a typical pose of the era, which looked to be late seventies, early eighties, judging from their haircuts and regalia. They were in a cemetery, variously slouching against one tombstone or another, wearing mirror sunglasses and wasp-waisted jackets, their hair judiciously mussed. As to which one was Carey Fortunoff — the dead man — I couldn’t say, though for the two or three minutes I invested in staring at the photo I imagined he was the one standing — slouching — just slightly to the left of the four others and staring out away from the camera as if he had better things on his mind than posing for a cheesy promotional shot. And that was it. I clicked on something else, which led me to another thing altogether and before I knew it half an hour had vanished from my life. Then I went down to see what Chrissie wanted to do about dinner.